In 18th century Vienna, the Hungarian engineer and debutant Wolfgang von Kempelen shocked court patrons with a bizarre contraption: a great mechanical box which could seemingly play and even win chess games without any input from a human. Called the “Mechanical Turk,” Kempelen’s device became the talk of high society for decades, and went on to beat famed opponents including Ben Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte.
Of course, they didn’t exactly have computers back then. In reality, Herr Kempelen had built a complicated-looking device with enough dummy wires and gears to fool any suspicious observer — all meant to conceal a human chess master pulling the strings deep inside.
Though Kempelen’s cover was finally blown in the 1850s, the legacy of the Mechanical Turk lives on to this day. Except, instead of racist chess cabinets, we have Amazon “Just Walk Out” stores operated by sweatshop laborers in India, and AI coding chatbots powered by ghost workers in Kenya.
And we also have Fireflies, an AI note-taking startup. Earlier this summer, Fireflies made headlines when it announced a $1 billion valuation, bragging that “75 percent” of Fortune 500 companies were using its services to transcribe corporate meetings.
It’s a particularly impressive number, given Fireflies’ CTO and co-founder Sam Udotong’s recent admission that the company got its start in 2017 by “charging $100/month for an AI that was really just two guys.”
“The best way to validate your business idea is by becoming the product yourself,” Udotong wrote in a LinkedIn post. “We told our customers there’s an ‘AI that’ll join a meeting.’ In reality it was just me and my co-founder calling in to the meeting sitting there silently and taking notes by hand.”
Whenever a customer needed notes taken for a meeting, the CTO explained, either he or his co-founder, Krish Ramineni, would dial into the room as “Fred,” masquerading as a Siri-like equivalent. “We’d sit there silently, take detailed notes, and send them 10 minutes later,” Udotong explained.
The founders were only able to make rent and keep their startup dreams alive after logging over 100 meetings this way, he wrote, finally securing a win after six other ventures had blown up in their faces.
Unlike Kempelen’s Mechanical Turk, Udotong says the pair have since “automated” Fireflies’ notetaking process. However, the admission underscores the “fake it ’til you make it” mentality endemic of successful tech startups — an environment which rewards snake oil salesmen over those who would try to improve the world outside of the profit system.
Though plenty of LinkedIn users are torching Udotong in the comments, the CTO is now claiming early enterprise customers knew there was a “human in the loop,” and simply didn’t care.
Given their success in the years since Fireflies’ mechanical Turk routine, he’s probably not wrong. And here lies the problem: whether the work is done by an invisible human or an algorithm, the startup market is more interested in rewarding the appearance of progress rather than progress itself.
This in turn creates the financial conditions which justify the original deception — and of course, lines the pockets of the startup’s founders — which, when you think about how big a role startups play in the US economy, kind of explains a lot about our current moment.
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